Professor Charles Anthony Richard Hoare, known as Tony to friends, has died at the age of 92. One of the greatest programmers in the early history of computing, he invented the Quicksort algorithm after a bet with his boss, later devised Hoare logic (a system for rigorously assessing the correctness of a program), and was the co-designer of ALGOL W, a programming language that would become the basis for Pascal.
Hoare was also a deeply funny, philosophical, and self-deprecating man who had a hundred other achievements to his name. On winning the Turing Award in 1980, he delivered a lecture called The Emperor’s Old Clothes in which he gave a wry look back at his career’s successes and failures, and used them to bemoan overly complex software and bloated systems, urging programmers to focus on simplicity and security instead.
Article continues below
He is also responsible for many almost Wildean aphorisms about his work, and that of others. In 1973 he said of ALGOL-60: “Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.”
Perhaps Hoare’s most oft-quoted line comes from the above-mentioned Turing lecture (thanks, The Register):
“I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”
Hoare was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1934. During World War 2 the family moved to Zimbabwe, known then as Rhodesia, and then to Britain, where Hoare would go on to study Literae humaniores (Classics) at Merton College, Oxford. Hoare served in the Royal navy, where he learned Russian and studied at Moscow University, and worked with the great Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov: a problem-solving exercise involving Russian words would give him the idea for what later became Quicksort.
He married Jill Pym in 1962, and they had three children. As well as the Turing Award in 1980, Hoare’s incredible list of honours includes the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (1981), the Faraday Medal (1985), the Computer Pioneer Award (1990), the Kyoto Prize (2000), the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2011), and the Royal Medal (2023). In 2000 he was Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to education and computer science.
Gaming Industry#Turing #Award #winner #Tony #Hoare #computing #pioneer #invented #Quicksort #algorithm #sixpence #bet #dies #age1773372290
